No credit card required
Browse credit cards from a variety of issuers to see if there's a better card for you.
A couple of my friends living overseas asked me to buy them some stuff in the US worth roughly $2000-2500 in total. They will either wire me the money or hand it over to me in cash when we meet in person in the end of the month. So I have a chance now to easily spend roughly $2000-3000 on any card almost in one go without falling out of my normal spending patterns. I thought it might be a nice idea to get some cashback / miles / points on this amount. Obvious idea might be to charge it to my BofA Travel Rewards card and simply get 1,5% on this (which is also quite nice for such an amount of spending), but I thought it might be worth to apply for a card with some decent sign-up bonus for spending this kind of money.
My first though was about CSP (I think it's 40000 points now for $3000 spent, which seems to be interesting), but I am a little bit hesitant to go for CSP now as I have only one card with a limit over $5000 now and my Chase Amazon card has only passed its 6-months mark recently).
Any other ideas on what I can also apply for in order to maximize potential reward for spending this money? I normally don't consider cards with more than $1000 spending requirement in 2-3 months, as my CC spending is usually not that huge (except for airfare), but here is a little bit different case as technically money is not mine :-)
Thanks a lot for advice!
I just got AMEX Delta Platinum today - it gave 30K miles after 500$ spend... not too shabby
Discover More, $200 bonus for $1,500 spending:
I'm assuming your current Discover is more than one year old.
HiLine, thanks for advice.
No, my More is now at its 8-months mark, but my DW doesn't have her own Discover and she keeps getting pre-approvals from them. Might be a good idea for her to apply...
@mikka1 wrote:A couple of my friends living overseas asked me to buy them some stuff in the US worth roughly $2000-2500 in total. They will either wire me the money or hand it over to me in cash when we meet in person in the end of the month. So I have a chance now to easily spend roughly $2000-3000 on any card almost in one go without falling out of my normal spending patterns. I thought it might be a nice idea to get some cashback / miles / points on this amount. Obvious idea might be to charge it to my BofA Travel Rewards card and simply get 1,5% on this (which is also quite nice for such an amount of spending), but I thought it might be worth to apply for a card with some decent sign-up bonus for spending this kind of money.
My first though was about CSP (I think it's 40000 points now for $3000 spent, which seems to be interesting), but I am a little bit hesitant to go for CSP now as I have only one card with a limit over $5000 now and my Chase Amazon card has only passed its 6-months mark recently).
Any other ideas on what I can also apply for in order to maximize potential reward for spending this money? I normally don't consider cards with more than $1000 spending requirement in 2-3 months, as my CC spending is usually not that huge (except for airfare), but here is a little bit different case as technically money is not mine :-)
Thanks a lot for advice!
Also, what sort of "stuff", i.e. can it fit into a category that gets enhanced rewards.
@mikka1 wrote:HiLine, thanks for advice.
No, my More is now at its 8-months mark, but my DW doesn't have her own Discover and she keeps getting pre-approvals from them. Might be a good idea for her to apply...
I would strongly advise that you guys do that. In terms of cash back bonus, $200 is probably the best offer on the market right now. If you're looking for frequent flier miles bonus, there may exist higher cash-equivalent offers.
@bs6054 wrote:Also, what sort of "stuff", i.e. can it fit into a category that gets enhanced rewards.
Couple of unlocked iPhones 5 (unfortunately, they are still excluded from ShopDiscover bonuses from Apple) + some more rare items that I will be buying in specialized brick&mortar stores, and it is very unlikely I will find those kind of stores having enchanced rewards on any of my cards.
It seems that the best way to go will be the following - I will try to apply for CSP myself first. If denied (odds of denial are high, unfortunately), I will ask my wife to apply for Discover with $200 sign-up bonus. If she is denied as well (which is also possible as she's quite new to credit and has only 2 cards now that are less than 6 months) I'll apply for Delta Amex :-)))) And only if this doesn't work as well, I'll say "f**k it" and charge it to my BofA Travel Rewards :-)
Have you shopped at these stores before? Check through your statements to see what the merchant codes are first.